In modern computing systems, it is often desirable to limit access to electronic content, services, or processing resources, or to allow only certain entities to perform certain actions. A variety of techniques have been developed or proposed to enable such control. These techniques are often referred to as digital rights management (DRM) techniques because, in general terms, their goal is to manage the rights of various entities in digital or other electronic content, services, or resources. Systems and methods are presented herein for facilitating the management of electronic content. It will be appreciated that these systems and methods are novel, as are many of the components, systems, and methods employed therein.
In a preferred group of embodiments, systems and methods are provided that support the description and control of different types of zones in electronic content. For example, a zone might comprise a portion of a media presentation that has specific attributes representing constraints that a media player application must obey when playing back the presentation, such as an advertisement zone that must not be skipped, or a warning screen that must be viewed before the rest of the presentation can be viewed.
While prior systems have attempted to require users to view advertisements or warnings, these systems typically hardcoded such requirements (and the advertisements and warnings themselves) into the system architecture and provided no visibility into whether such requirements were actually honored or how many times the warnings or advertisements were viewed. Preferred embodiments of the inventive body of work described herein can be used to ameliorate some or all of these drawbacks, and to enable rich, flexible, policy-based controls to be associated with the manner in which viewing requirements are enforced and recorded, and also support the dynamic modification of such requirements, including, without limitation, modification of such requirements based on events such as the passage of time, the satisfaction of other conditions, and/or the like. In addition, preferred embodiments of the systems and methods described herein enable the dynamic insertion of content, such as an advertisement, into a piece of rights-managed content, such that playback of the advertisement is governed in accordance with policies specified, e.g., by the author, publisher, and/or distributor of the content and/or the advertisement. Thus, preferred embodiments of the systems and methods described herein enable the use of digital rights management techniques to support the insertion and controlled playback or other use of specific portions of a piece of electronic content.
It should be appreciated that embodiments of the presently described inventive body of work can be implemented in numerous ways, including as processes, apparatuses, systems, devices, methods, computer readable media, and/or as a combination thereof. Several illustrative embodiments are described below.